Tag: social media

Weekend Recap: Staking My Claim

I feel like too much of my idle time is spent being annoyed with social media.  It’s impossible to quit, even if the recent Facebook privacy bullshit makes my blood boil.  And I’m getting bored of myself telling everyone I’m taking a break.   There’s nothing more annoying than logging into Facebook with the sole express purpose of telling everyone that I’m taking a Facebook break, especially since my “breaks” tend to last about 45 minutes.

So, then, I think I’ve finally started to get a handle on how I want to deal with social media.  Which is to say:  I’m gonna start posting here more often (or, at least, as often as I can), and probably only here; this blog gets pushed to my FB and Twitter and Tumblr (which I think I still have?), and so I won’t necessarily vanish, but that’s gonna be about it.

So it’s gonna get a bit more LiveJournal-y around here, is what I’m trying to say.  Be warned.

So the boy turned 5 on March 31st, and then he promptly had the flu for the next 5 days, and so last week kinda just fell apart.  Both my wife and I had been teetering on the edge of coming down with it, too, though I think it’s over now.  His fifth trip around the Sun can only get better from here, right?  Let’s hope.

Now that the basement is back – and better than ever – I’ve been rearranging my music area.  The big news is that I’m getting a brand-new iMac delivered next week, while I’m home on a mini-staycation.  This means that, at long last, I can finally start getting back to work in earnest.

I’ve been re-listening to the stuff I recorded back in 2015, when this album was really getting started (gasp – has it really been three years already?), and while some of it has gone a bit stale, I’m still really happy with quite a lot of it.  And so to be able to return to it with working equipment and a fresh attitude in a really pleasant environment is basically a dream come true.  This is all I’ve wanted since we moved out to the ‘burbs in the first place.  Believe me, I will be Instagramming the shit out of my work space once the computer is set up and ready to go.

I can’t begin to tell you guys how often I’ve considered giving up and just throwing the demos up on Soundcloud or whatever.  I’m really happy with this stuff but I’ve been so frustrated in my inability to finish it, whether it’s making the formal transition from demo to actual recording, in a real studio with real musicians and a real engineer, or even just finishing one (1) goddamned set of lyrics that don’t make me gag.  I don’t think I can afford to bring a full band into the picture, but ideally I’d like to send my finished tracks to a producer I know for a proper mix – I may have to raise some funds for that, but we’ll get there when we get there.  The point is – it’s been three years since I started this thing, and I still like it.  So I’m gonna get it out there.

In the course of getting my workspace set up, I stumbled across some hilarious photos/headshots that must’ve been taken in the late 90s, and MAN.  I have some thoughts.

So there’s a couple things to point out here.

  1. As I’ve probably mentioned here, this album that I’m working on is inspired by a somewhat traumatic re-read of my college and post-college diaries.  And those photos that you see here are, in fact, from that very same time period.  All the neurotic insanity that I was scribbling down on a super-shitty word processor was coming out of the dude in the photos above.  This is hilarious.
  2. I keep joking that it’s only taken me 42 years to finally figure out my look, but it’s absolutely goddamned true.  The doofus in the pictures above had absolutely no idea how to look good.  I never truly felt comfortable in my own skin and clothes and outward presentation until very, very recently, and it’s weird to see these photos and barely recognize myself in them.
  3. I’ve spent most of my last few years of therapy sessions talking about this period of my life (1993-1999), because it’s where, for lack of a better term, the most stuff happened to me.  The best stuff, the worst stuff, the most inane stuff, the weirdest stuff, the scariest stuff, the most heartbreaking stuff.   (My life before college was tumultuous, as is everyone’s, but it wasn’t particularly noteworthy, and it’s been relatively drama-free since 2000, when I met the woman who would become my wife.)  And it just kills me to think that during this era, I looked like that.

*sigh*

Not much to report on the book front.  I’ve been re-reading the first two books of Brandon Sanderson’s “Stormlight Archive” series because I haven’t yet read the third, and even though I like them they get a bit long.  You’d think that I’d be able to re-read these books a bit faster, since I’ve already read them, but instead I’m kinda just putting it off altogether.  It is what it is.

Finally, a few words about Far Cry 5.

I’m around 22 hours into the campaign; I’ve beaten 1 of the 3 sub-bosses, but I’m mostly just screwing around with the world itself and doing everything I can to avoid actually dealing with the story.  This is one of the few times where I’m actually quite grateful that this open world is so stuffed with things to do, because it makes the avoidance of the narrative that much easier to handle.  So while I’m only a third of the way into the campaign, I’ve found dozens of underground bunkers and collectible items and weird side missions, and that shit is great!  So much fun.

But my god, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so compelled to keep playing a game that is so unrelenting in its narrative awfulness.  There’s so many other directions this game could have gone, and it annoys me to no end that they went in this particular direction instead.  To be fair, it definitely has that “over-the-top” Far Cry vibe, but it’s not rooted in anything that is relevant to this moment in time, which is frustrating if only because it has so many relevant things in it.   (There is a side mission that involves you recovering what could only be “the pee tape”, though why it’s in a cult outpost in rural Montana instead of a Russian hard drive in a well-protected safehouse is… well, who knows.)

Whatever; this is the game we’ve got.  Being angry at it because it’s not telling the story I’d like it to tell isn’t fair.  And yet to take it on its own terms is madness.  Nothing about the story makes any sense.  Nothing about this fictionalized Montana, where literally everyone who isn’t a cult member has a stash of heavy weaponry and an underground bunker and yet are wildly impotent in the face of danger, makes any sense.  Any activity that requires talking to a non-player character is frustrating and awful and ridiculous.

AND YET IT’S SO PRETTY AND THE NON-LINEAR STUFF IS SO GOOD.

There are two somewhat spoiler-heavy articles that I’ve read recently that articulate my problems with the game better than I ever could.  And honestly, now that I’ve had the ending spoiled for me, I feel a little better in how I approach the game in the first place.  Anyway, if you’d like to know what I’m dealing with, and you don’t mind INCREDIBLY MAJOR SPOILERS, I heartily encourage you to read the following:

Ambient Humanity

My son turns 5 on Saturday, and that is ridiculous.  There’s no way he’s already 5 years old.

Have you ever fallen in love with a song so much it made you cry?  It happens to me all the time.  And it happened to him this weekend.  He fell hard for this song from the end credits in the Captain Underpants movie – and yes, that is a weird thing to fall in love with, but far be it for me to deprive him of a cathartic response to art; the heart wants what it wants.  We listened to it in the car on the way to swim class, and when I went to get him out of the car I noticed that he was sniffly and sad, and I asked him what was wrong, and he said “Daddy I love you”, and that the song made him “happy sad”, and he said he loved me again and he gave me a big hug and dried his eyes on my shoulder, and my heart melted all over the parking lot of the West Essex YMCA.

We have our basement back!  And it only took 2 weeks!  The longest and most stressful 2 weeks of our lives as homeowners, but still!  I can’t begin to explain how relieved I am to have everything back up and running again.

Of course, there are still some things that need to be replaced.  My computer desk(s) got kinda fucked up during the renovation, and my computers are still busted (though not due to the flooding), and so on and so on.  But the point is, you can hang out down there again.   Which means I’ll have more stuff to write about here.

I’ve been feeling more and more like it’s time for me to finally pull the plug on Facebook, even though it’s really, really difficult to suddenly cut myself off from pretty much everyone I know.  (And my family would kill me if I suddenly deprived them of photos of my kid.)  I’ve sorta had it in the back of my mind that I’m gonna keep my account right up until I finish this stupid album, and I can get the word out, and then after that’s run its course I’ll shut my account down and spend more time over here.

And it’s gonna be a while until this album gets finished.  So there’s no real timetable just yet.

In any event, I came across this Kottke post that resonated pretty heavily with me – not just because I used to be a die-hard Livejournal user, but because even after all these years I’ve never felt quite as part of a community as I did over there.  There’s no question that WordPress is a better platform for creating stuff, but it’s awfully tough to foster friendships and connections here.  Facebook (for me, at least) was never about meeting new people, it was only ever about reconnecting with people I’d lost touch with.  Twitter (for me) is almost entirely about reading what other people have to say, because anything I write there barely ripples the water’s endless surface.

AOL IM 4eva, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, the post inside that Kottke thing is here, and it’s great, and this pull-quote is hitting me exactly where I live.

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

So:  Far Cry 5 comes out this week; my rental copy of Ni No Kuni 2 should be arriving today; I’m continuing to move along in QUBE 2, which is a Portal-esque first-person puzzler that breaks my brain in interesting and very satisfying ways; and there’s some other indie puzzlers that I’d like to get back to, when I have time, which I don’t.  But now that the basement’s back, I can at least make the attempt.

here / not here

1. [cross-posting from my secret blog, but bear with me]

So every once in a while I get overwhelmed by whatever it is that overwhelms me about people, and so I publicly announce that I’m taking a Facebook hiatus, and each time I do the hiatus never lasts, and I feel like a hypocrite.  I’ll hit the “post” button announcing my farewell, and then I’ll be lurking on FB within 20 minutes of my initial post.  I acknowledge that this is ridiculous.

However: as I may or may not have mentioned, my day job has instituted these new draconian internet firewalls, and so not only can I not use my work PC to access my personal email, but I’m also completely shut out of Facebook.

And this means that, if I do want to use Facebook during normal business hours, I have to use my iPhone.  And the iPhone FB experience is a fucking dumpster fire.  It doesn’t matter how many times I ask it to stay in chronological order; it straight-up refuses to work in the way that I want it to.  Which means I invariably always miss something.  And since a lot of the reason why I used to spend so much time on FB is that weird “fear of missing out”, I kinda have no choice but to confront that particular fear head-on.

And so the oft-threatened hiatus is actually starting to stick.  I don’t really check it all that frequently any more, because I know the experience will suck when I do, and there’s nothing I can do to fix something that refuses to stay fixed.

Instead, I’m now on Twitter like a motherfucker.  (@couchshouts, if you didn’t already know.  If you knew me as @jervonyc, that account is long dormant.)  My twitter account is mostly political retweets and announcements of blog posts, so, you know, keep your expectations in check.

At least WordPress still works – for the time being, at least.  I don’t expect this to last forever, either, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

2. We are all agreed that Portal 2 is one of the best games ever made, yes?  Yes, of course.  It was recently made backward-compatible on the ol’ Xbox One, which is great news, because I very much like that game and would like to continue to play it.  Especially the online co-op mode, because that mode is SUPER AWESOME and it’s been a long time since the last time I played it and I’ve forgotten all the solutions.  HOWEVAH, the online co-op doesn’t seem to work anymore?  Possibly?  I’d like some external confirmation about this, actually, because me and my buddy tried to do a bit of the co-op campaign over the weekend and we couldn’t keep a session together for more than 10 minutes.  ALSO, Portal 2’s online interface, as designed and intended for the 360, does not work at all with respect to the XB1, which is a bit of a problem.

tl,dr version: remaster Portal 1 and 2 for next-gen consoles and, hey, why not include Portal 3 while you’re at it.

3. I was feeling pretty good about No Man’s sky again, especially in light of yesterday’s post.  So last night I fired up the game, struggled to find the one element I was looking for in order to complete my super-mega warp drive for about 90 minutes, and then the game crashed. Again.  So, yeah.  Maybe I’ll keep that one on the shelf until the next patch.

 

disconnection

I’m feeling a little disconnected lately, which might explain why I’ve been quiet here.

The biggest problem I mentioned in my last post – that of my almost-3-year-old son refusing to go to bed – is starting to wind down, so that’s something positive, at least.  Of course, my wife is sick, and the kid has a bit of a cough as well, and I’m very much feeling on the verge of catching something, too.  We’re all falling apart, is what I’m saying.

That said, I’m feeling guilty about whining.

I’m trying to tone down the amount of whining I do on social media, which is actually a bit easier than I expected, given that almost all forms of social media are driving me crazy right now and make me far less inclined to post than I normally would be.  Facebook keeps hiding posts from friends; Twitter is a garbage fire; Tumblr is filled with ads and every once in a while a random naked person will show up, unannounced and uncalled for, and so that’s off-limits.

I’m also starting to reach critical mass in terms of the upcoming election.  I’m disgusted and anxious and not at all prepared to move to Canada.

 

And, of course, I’m disconnected from the things I normally talk about here.

Book-wise, I’m re-reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which I’d been thinking about recently (especially after reading Christopher Buckley’s The Relic Master), and which I felt obligated to pick up in light of Eco’s passing.  It’s one of my all-time favorite books, and yet I’m having trouble fully engaging with it this time around for some reason.

Music-wise, I’m still struggling with writing lyrics, and in the meantime I’m not listening to anything particularly inspiring.  On a related note, I have to say that my weekly Spotify Discovery playlists have been awfully lackluster this year; the ratio of hit/miss is way, way off, especially as compared to last year.

Games-wise… I’m a big pile of “meh”.  I’m very much intrigued by The Division, and I’m looking forward to playing it in co-op, but I’m also wary of it; the beta showed off a lot of high points as well as a lot of lows – the writing in particular is just awful, and a lot of the mission designs felt very familiar (i.e., the final encounter in the Subway Morgue is a very typical “hold your ground for an arbitrary length of time”, and I was tired of that kind of mission in Destiny).  I tried playing a little bit of Fallout 4 last night, given that it’s been patched up quite a bit of late, and… yeah, I still don’t give a shit about that game.  I’m inching along in my NG+ of Witcher 3, but the Hearts of Stone expansion is for level 61+, and I’m still only at 43 or so; that’s an awful lot of ground to make up, and as much as I love that game I’m not sure I have it in me to repeat it.  Later this week my rental copy of Far Cry Primal will arrive, and as I’ve been lukewarm on that franchise for the last few iterations, I’m not sure that I’ll be fully engaged with it – even if the Stone Age setting is novel.

So, yeah.  I’m scared of American politics, I’m culturally out of sorts, and I’m physically falling apart.  I hit the trifecta.

On Self-Imposed Exile

Yeah, I know, I’m not writing much these days.  I try to keep writing here as much as I can, but some days it’s harder than others.  Some days it’s crazy busy; some days my brain simply isn’t working; and some days – like today – I find myself in this weird, stupid brain trap where I want to write while also, at the same time, feeling very much like shutting up and never writing again.

This happens to me every once in a while, and I deal with it in different ways each time.  Some times I fight it head-on, hoping that I’ll work my way out of whatever the issue is simply by the process of writing, regardless of whether or not I hit the “Publish” button; sometimes I hide behind a Tumblr-reblog spree; and other times I simply give in and withdraw completely.  No posts anywhere – not on Twitter, nor Tumblr, nor Facebook, nor here.  I vanish.  I hide.  Oh, I keep reading; whenever I announce that I’m taking a break from social media, more often than not what I’m actually saying is that I’m going to lurk.  And even then, there’s varying degrees of lurking.

Today is a day where I’ve been so busy that I simply haven’t been paying attention to the internet; and when I’ve had a few moments of relative peace, I’ve chosen to only look occasionally.

The trouble with writing is that it’s hard to call yourself a writer if you’re not giving anybody anything to read.

The trouble with composing is that it’s hard to call yourself a musician if you’re not giving anybody anything to listen to.

The trouble with being a good friend is that it’s hard to call yourself a good friend if you’re consciously withdrawing from other people.

It’s very easy to invalidate yourself; it can be very difficult to successfully reclaim yourself after you’ve walked away from what you tried to build.

I’m writing this because I’m in this weird stupid head space where I’ve been living for the better part of 2 weeks and it’s annoying and stupid and childish, and it’s my fault that I’ve chosen to put myself in this head space, and I very much want to get out of it.  There are exciting things happening in my life that I’m genuinely excited about – like tomorrow’s home inspection of what will hopefully (fingers crossed) be our new home, later this summer.  Like the album that I’m still working on (even though I’ve been sidetracked and distracted by this whole home-buying process).  Like my son, who is amazing, and who makes my heart smile even during my darkest hours.

But I keep sliding back into this self-imposed exile, this recursive loop of withdrawing, and it’s endlessly frustrating.

Anyway – I’m here, and I’m trying to get back into the swing of things, and I’m sorry if my recent silence has caused you any undue concern.  Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s inspection goes amazing, and that on Friday I’ll be ready to talk about E3 and The Witcher 3 and You Must Build a Boat and other such things.

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